Readers' Blog: No vote in referendum for having no abortion at all
I am genuinely mystified by the apparent assumption on the side of those who are against repeal of the eighth amendment that Ireland is somehow “abortion-free”, and that a vote against repeal is a vote against abortion for the women of Ireland.
We have in our Constitution an absurd contradiction. The Eighth Amendment gives the “unborn”, from conception to term, an absolute right to life, notwithstanding the equal right to life of the pregnant woman.
The Thirteenth Amendment confers a right to a woman to travel abroad for an abortion. The Thirteenth undoes the effect of the Eighth, and women have been travelling abroad to terminate their pregnancies at a rate of at least 10 every day.
The Eighth Amendment does not prevent Irish abortions, it just attempts to prevent them in Ireland, which it hasn’t even achieved since the arrival of the abortion pill. In doing this it makes those abortions happen later, as women have to raise money, organise time off work, organise childminding, and make travel arrangements. The anti-repeal side have set themselves up as “anti-abortion”.
They are not anti-abortion, they are anti-abortion in Ireland. And in being so they are declaring themselves in
favour of later abortions.
The honest approach to this referendum is that a yes vote is for earlier, safer abortions in Ireland, and a no vote is for later, sometimes unsafe abortions.
There is no vote available in this referendum for no abortion at all. This fight to retain the Eighth Amendment is the wrong fight for people who are truly anti-abortion in all circumstances. These people should have been fighting for repeal of the Thirteenth Amendment. Why were they not? Surely it can’t be that the illusion of an abortion-free Ireland is enough for them?
